Stop me if you’ve heard this: “Humans are hardwired for stories.” Or: “Storytelling is the new marketing.”

But what does that really mean? How does something squishy like “story” drive real business success? And how can you use your brand stories to connect with customers, grow your business, do work you love?

To succeed with content marketing now and the years to come, we need to rethink our foundational stories based on a new framework for 2021. And critically: We need to think how we tell them. (Hint: There are four vital factors.)

In this lively, high-energy talk, master storyteller Ann Handley will educate you, inspire you, and leave you ready to tell stories that pack awallop. She’ll show Marketing Breakthroughs 2021 superstars (that’s you!) how to tell stories that both nurture new customers and nourish the ones you already have.

You’ll learn:
– Why Storytelling is the brilliant marketer’s best maneuver
– The Four Factors of Storytelling Success that you need to craft the very best customer experiences
– How other organizations are succeeding with storytelling
– BONUS: A specific template you can use to tell your own brand story

Let’s demystify Storytelling together in this lively and enlightening talk by the World’s First Chief Content Officer herself! Who’s in?

#Ghosted: How To Engage and Convert the Silent, the No-Shows, and the Unreachable

We’ve all seen it. A lead or account signs up to a webinar, downloads a ton of resources and it looks like they’re really interested in you. But when it comes to attending an event or taking that first call with an SDR – they ghost you. It sucks. So how can we engage these no shows – or at least try and figure out who’s serious and who’s wasting our time? In this session we’ll explore:

• Why you need to differentiate between marketer-defined engagement and engagement that means a lead is ready for a conversion.
• How to re-engage no shows with diverse content, formats and channels.
• Balancing the need of your buyer to work on their terms vs. your need to know if they are ever going to buy.
• Tips, tricks and actions to take with no shows to make your pipeline stronger and more reliable.

How to Use Webinars to Supercharge Your Demand Gen

Webinars and online events have exploded in the past couple of years. Even before 2020, research by SiriusDecisions found that webinars were the highest-rated human touchpoint for buyers. However, even though on-demand viewing is moving towards becoming the most popular method of webinar engagement, many marketers still plan their webinars in a one-off fashion, limiting success and reducing efficiency. So how can marketers plan an efficient and scalable webinar series that continually adds to the pipeline in the most effective way?  In this session we’ll explore:

• The types of webinar and online events that are easy to scale
• How to identify your target audience and their needs based on their buying journey
• How to repurpose and reactivate your webinars so a single recording pays off several times over
• How to use engagement data and other KPIs to continually improve the success of your webinars over time

Getting Face-to-Face in 2021: Creating Human Engagement in a Digital World

Building virtual events that get attendees through the digital door is one thing. But creating experiences that truly engage audiences and spark human conversations takes a certain je ne sais quoi. Chief Nation and ON24’s VP of Marketing, Tessa Barron will break down what it takes to facilitate authentic, human connections in a virtual event space. They’ll exchange success stories, answer audience questions in real time, and share examples of how leading brands are bringing the human touch into a digital world. In this session you’ll get ideas on how to:

• Come up with fun interactive event ideas audiences love
• Create networking opportunities that put attendees at ease
• Drive engagement that generates deep audience insights
• Have fun with your digital event strategy!
• Come with questions, we have answers.

How Experiences and Engagement Fuel Great Results

B2B marketers are used to change — from tools and tactics to strategies and campaigns. But there’s one adjustment everyone is still trying to figure out: how to adapt to a digital era of engagement. The short answer? Focus on digital engagement.But if you want the details — the long answer — then join us as Adobe’s Senior Manager of Audience and Data Technologies, Steve Allison, sits down with ON24’s Digital Platform Solutions Specialist, Matt Downes, to discuss how digital experiences help marketers to keep up with change and engage audiences globally. In this session you’ll learn how:

• 2020 redefined digital marketing and audience experience
• Marketers can capitalise on change and create amazing experiences
• Tips and tricks to global collaboration and broadening audience reach

Going Global: How to Create Local Experiences for Regional Audiences

When one of your campaigns has performed brilliantly in one region, it shouldn’t be surprising that you’re asked to replicate it in another market — particularly if your colleagues in international offices don’t have the same resources you do. After all, now that buying decisions are online, it’s easy to think that reaching new markets is no big deal.

In reality, international marketing is far from easy. A programme that drives a ton of business in one market can easily fall flat in another. Worse still, you may even damage your brand or scupper existing deals. So what are the steps you should follow before you simply copy and paste your marketing and promote it in another part of the world?

Join experts from ON24, NetLine and Iron Horse to learn how you can successfully scale your B2B marketing in new markets and avoid the common yet hard-to-see pitfalls of international marketing. In this session you’ll discover:

• How to recalibrate your targeting based on regional characteristics.
• Why great localisation is much more than translation.
• The cultural considerations that make local buying processes very different.
• The actionable steps you should follow before running your existing campaigns in new markets.

Getting More From Personalised Marketing with Pardot and ON24

This year has forced marketers to adjust their event strategies and start creating digital experiences capable of generating the leads our cancelled in-person events ALMOST cost us. For many, this shift began as a temporary fix, but companies industry-wide are already preparing for a new digital-first future. So how can we continue to reimagine virtual-event engagement to keep our funnels fed, and our financials flowing? 

Pardot and ON24 will partner to show you how to create an effective digital-event strategy that drives engagement and generates the actionable insights you need to turn leads into revenue. In this session you’ll learn how to:

• Increase digital-event engagement
• Use that engagement to track digital-buying signals 
• Deliver personalised experiences that create meaningful connections 
• Create relevant content journeys for target accounts

3 Steps to Rev Up Your Sales and Marketing

Marketing success requires the right combination of people and process. Join us as panelists from Leandata, 6sense, Allocadia discuss how marketers can set new Revenue Operations habits to orchestrate, automate and yield greater ROI from your digital campaigns. 

Key takeaways include: 

• Create and execute effective sales enablement strategies 
• Fine tune the sales lead handoff process 
• Reach and influence leads with right-time, right-place messaging 
• Map buyers to stages of the buying journey and track the success of every marketing touchpoint 

No “I” in Revenue Team: 5 Steps for A Full-Funnel Sales and Marketing Strategy

Now that all sales and marketing is digital, having an integrated, collaborative strategy is table stakes for revenue growth. But what does that new revenue team look like in action? And how do you coordinate full-funnel campaign execution without getting in each other’s way? In this session you’ll learn best practices for partnership and pipeline building from the heads of marketing and sales development from both ON24 and Cognism, including:

• Processes for account prioritization and contact acquisition
• Playbooks for parallel inbound/outbound programs that engage, nurture and accelerate leads
• Tactics for driving pushes and incentive offers to book more prospect meetings
• Methodologies for measuring impact and attribution outside of the MQL
• Operations to put in place for scale